I think that technologies are morally neutral until we apply them. It's only when we use them for good or for evil that they become good or evil.

A book exists at the intersection of the author's subconscious and the reader's response.

I had a list of things that science fiction, particularly American science fiction, to me seemed to do with tedious regularity. One was to not have strong female protagonists. One was to envision the future, whatever it was, as America.

I suppose I do the Japanese because I just don't know China. Chinese popular culture has never evoked that instant of, "Whoah! What's that?" that I have with Japanese popular culture.

If ignorance were enough to make things not exist, the world would be more like a lot of people think it is. But it's not. And it's not.

I think the large part of the function of the Internet is it is archival. It's unreliable to the extent that word on the street is unreliable. It's no more unreliable than that. You can find the truth on the street if you work at it. I don't think of the Internet or the virtual as being inherently inferior to the so-called real.

I started writing short fiction very briefly, as I imagine is the case for some novelists.